The field of the invention is systems and methods for the segmentation of anatomy in medical images. More particularly, the invention relates to systems and methods for nerve segmentation in images acquired with magnetic resonance imaging (“MRI”).
Nerve segmentation is an attractive clinical goal because allowing clinicians to accurately and non-invasively visualize the three-dimensional structure of a nerve can improve surgical planning and guidance, as well as improve treatment and diagnosis of pathologies associated with a nerve.
Region-growing techniques have been used to segment blood vessels; however, these methods are not adequate for segmenting anatomical structures, such as nerves, that may have low contrast in relation to the surrounding anatomical features.
Active contouring techniques can overcome some of the difficulties with region-growing, and have been implemented for segmenting blood vessels; however, these methods must be properly initialized and still suffer from lower reliability in low contrast areas of an image.
More recently, a nerve segmentation technique was described in co-pending U.S. Patent Application No. 2014/0328529. While this technique overcomes the limitations of previous segmentation methods, the technique may have some difficulty segmenting highly curved nerves, such as nerves that may be present in the brachial plexus.
It would therefore be desirable to provide a method for segmenting a three-dimensional volume associated with a nerve that is fast and robust to the unique image contrasts associated with nerve images.